"Diego A. Mayer-Cantu" <diego@purdue.edu> writes:
> Last summer before I left the bay area, some friends of mine and I
> tried combinations of piracetam and hydergine, and I didnt really
> notice significant effects. I recently got my hands on some
> syntopressin (vassopressin) and found this to be extremely
> effective. The effects are very noticeable, and since it is sniffed,
> the onset is very rapid.
I would be sceptical of this kind of investigation. Piracetam seems to act on the memory consolidation process, likely by enhancing reorganization or something like that. The effects are non-obvious. Hydergine is, if I recall correctly, able to increase brain bloodflow and presumably useful, but might also be rather hard to notice. Vassopressin on the other hand has a lot of peripheral and central effects, and it is likely that it is they that are noticeable, not the memory enhancing effect.
The problem here is that it is easy to mix up placebo effects (you feel energized, this makes you think you are getting brighter and you study with more zest) with real effects. Substances that have been shown to exhibit memory enhancing properties in general do not have noticeable effects (except for some of the truly heavy substances like amphetamines, of course).
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